SILICON VALLEY — OpenAI said annualized revenue from advertising on ChatGPT, its artificial intelligence model, has surpassed $1 billion (1.4 trillion won) in about 200 days. The disclosure is seen as an effort to stress that the advertising business is bolstering earnings ahead of a planned listing early next year.
OpenAI said on the 31st that ChatGPT advertising, now running in more than 40 countries, has reached $1 billion. That comes about 200 days after the company began showing ads to users in the United States.
ChatGPT ad revenue accounts for 2.5% of OpenAI's total annualized revenue of $40 billion, a figure disclosed recently. The company said tens of thousands of advertisers are using its ad platform, adding that "advertising forms one pillar of a diversified business model alongside consumer subscriptions, enterprise services and usage-based application programming interfaces."
OpenAI said users experience discovery, evaluation and decision-making in a single flow through ChatGPT, and that advertising can create opportunities to deliver useful and highly relevant information. Some advertisers tripled their returns over 28-day campaigns.
OpenAI said it plans to expand ChatGPT advertising into more markets and introduce new ad formats, campaign objectives, buying options and performance measurement tools. The company said ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers and are displayed clearly separated from them.
The disclosure of advertising revenue is seen as an attempt to showcase performance to investors as OpenAI pursues an initial public offering. The company emphasized ad revenue after rival Anthropic overtook it in valuation and after it pushed back its listing from this year to early next year.
OpenAI began a pilot advertising service in the United States on Feb. 9, targeting free and low-cost ChatGPT Go accounts. Ads are shown to free ChatGPT users and subscribers to the lower-priced Go plan, and the service launched in South Korea in June.
Anthropic, by contrast, has declared it will not place ads on Claude, its AI model. Google has yet to apply advertising to Gemini. Earlier this year, Demis Hassabis, then chief executive of Google DeepMind, said he was "surprised" when OpenAI reversed its opposition to advertising. Anthropic also ran a Super Bowl ad criticizing OpenAI's move into advertising, fueling friction between the two companies.
